Let me just preface this by saying that I believe in the scientific method and this isn’t a refusal of it. It is just a logic game that I’ve been playing in my mind.
I’ve been thinking over the last few years if there’s anything that could be real, but would fail the scientific method. One day I started wondering about all the ghosts, and I started thinking about if it was possible for stuff to be real but be beyond our current scientific methodology. This doesn’t mean I believe in ghosts, I don’t, but if the scientific method is fully consistent with reality, in a way like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems for math.
The crucial element of the scientific method that would brake in a scenario like this would be reproducibility. We call scientific truths to phenomena that given the same inputs and a reaction, result on predictable outputs. If something isn’t reproducible, it isn’t science. So, for something to be real and fail the scientific method, its outcome needs to be dependent on inputs but its output needs to be random.
Obviously, one would start wondering about quantum phenomena, if there was something there that work like this. However phenomena at the quantum level behaves over probabilistic distributions, meaning that although it isn’t possible to accurately predict the location of an electron, you can predict where is the highest likelihood of find it.
But last night I think I might have an insight that would create a paradoxical situation like that. You just need higher dimensions than the one we currently inhabit. Let me give you an example:
Lets imagine that there’s a multi dimensional piece of paper. The geometry is irrelevant for this case, however this paper does exist outside our 3 dimensional projection. Let’s also suppose that fire emanates energy in all dimensions. And burning the paper would generate smoke in our dimensions. If i light up a lighter, and burn the paper I would see smoke appearing that I couldn’t explain where it came before. I couldn’t light it up again, because it was burnt, so the outcome was random. At least one time my inputs generated a real outcome, but because I am not a multidimensional being, I couldn’t see the totality of the system.
That means that the scientific method can only operate on our own observable universe. If the universe has higher dimensions that we can’t access, than there is real things that we will never comprehend (which again reminds of Godel). I think there are some possible consequences of this. For instance, for God to exist either he plays by our rules (Newton, Quantum, etc.) and is observable, or he needs to be a multidimensional being.
Most likely I’ve made some mistake in my deduction, and I would love to hear some criticism of my idea.